[open-government] Open Candidates --> more Open Government?? - YourNextMP opportunity in the UK

Fri Dec 12 15:56:05 UTC 2014

The YourNextMP effort in the UK is another great use of the "PopIt" Poplus
component.

See: http://bit.ly/mysocyournextmp  (text below too) and
http://bit.ly/poplusgroup

My experience is that a new generation of online engaged candidates is
starting to lead to greater online engagement with representative democracy
after the vote is taken.

Honestly, for the first twenty years most candidates turned-off all the
meaningful online engagement the moment they gained power from our votes.
This is changing in part perhaps as our representatives are beginning to
see that more digitally engaged government _offices_ are displacing their
representative connection with voters. Why contact your representative if
you can get your government service problems solved by 311? This means our
elected representative need to become more pro-actively engaged with
constituents/voters in other ways to stay relevant.

Being more social media connected early as a candidate will make it far
more likely they will be connected after the election.

So, let's help build out this platform so we can use its code/concept
across multiple countries for pro-actively surfacing candidates not just on
the web but crucially across social media FAR EARLIER in the election
process.

The best place to land from outside the UK is on the Poplus Online Group:
http://bit.ly/poplusgroup

Steven Clift
E-Democracy and now Engagement Lead, Poplus

P.S. In January, I'll officially be starting a special project with
mySociety and their Poplus partners to grow engagement in their efforts
starting with their lively online group where people are getting stuff down
through technical collaboration.

From: http://bit.ly/mysocyournextmp
YourNextMP – let’s pull together to make a free, trustworthy, open database
of General Election candidates

Let’s Not Reinvent the Wheel When When Can All Use the Same Wheel

Every general election there are a *load* of projects that all need the
same thing – a nicely formatted, accurate list of the candidates who are
standing at the election.

Loads of people need this data – journalists, app builders, campaigners,
Wikipedians, everyone.

But the government doesn’t actually publish the lists until right before
the election, and when it does the data isn’t the least bit suitable for
modern use (think unstructured PDFs and worse). It’s way too little and way
too late.

That’s why we’re big fans of the new YourNextMP.com <http://yournextmp.com/>,
a collaborative project headed up by our friends at Democracy Club
<http://ift.tt/1vVbPsi>, and endorsed by various other organisations,
including mySociety.

YourNextMP.com is a totally *free, open* database of candidates, that is
made partly from screen scraping and partly from *volunteer* contributions
from people who think that having a good quality single list is a sane
idea. It publishes the open data gathered both through a nice clean
website, and through a nice modern API. Soon it’ll also provide csv
export,too. And it means we can have nice shared identifiers for
candidates, meaning greater potential connectivity between election-related
journalisms, tools, sites and projects run by different people and
organisations.

The builders  of YourNextMP have also taken steps to ensure accuracy and
deter abuse, most strikingly by forcing all new data to be sourced, and
keeping nice public logs of all the changes (and who made them).

To be clear, YourNextMP is *not* a mySociety project. We are just very
happy to endorse the idea, and to supply one of our open source tools (PopIt
<http://popit.poplus.org>) to help store and share the data in useful ways.
Plus some of us have been chipping in in our spare time, for instance by
adding data.
*How can you help?*

There are two main ways:

*1)* *Add data!*  The main thing needed today, 146 days before the
election, is the most basic data on *who is known to be standing, today*.
We think that YourNextMP is *probably* already the most up to
date candidate list out there, despite being very much unfinished.

Additional data, about candidates’ Facebook pages, birth dates and so on,
isn’t such a high priority right now. You can help by looking up your
constituency on the site, or choosing a random constituency, and just using
your best Googling/telephoning skills to find out who’s definitely standing
this time.

If you want to chat to other people who are doing the same thing, use the
#yournextmp hashtag.

We’ve put together a few tips on canny ways to find information on
prospective candidates, here <http://ift.tt/1BoJSJG>.

Don’t feel you have to stop when you’ve filled in your own constituency –
there are plenty more to complete <http://ift.tt/1yIcY8P>.

*2) Spread the word that a single, high quality, free and shared database
of candidates is just A Good Thing that people should support.*

Who loves time-wasting? Nobody! What is YourNextMP if not an anti
time-wasting project?* Nothing! *So, please, if you’re planning an
election-related project, tell people that YourNextMP is a good idea, and
consider letting them use your logo on their site, as a sign of good will.

And if you see someone in your office about to *pay* for a proprietary
database of candidates, why not suggest they give the money to YourNextMP
instead?

Image: Duncan Harris <http://ift.tt/1BoJQSh> (CC <http://ift.tt/N3rZKX>)

from mySociety http://ift.tt/1yIcVtE
via IFTTT <http://ift.tt/1bODNcb>
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